o--was strangely melancholy at times, appeared almost to dislike
hearing music, and would never himself play, giving as his excuse, when
he was called upon, that he was so absorbed in science that he had no
time left in which to practise. And this was certainly true. Every day
he seemed to become more interested in biology, and his name appeared
once or twice in some of the scientific reviews, in connection with
certain curious experiments.

This was the man Dorian Gray was waiting for. Every second he kept
glancing at the clock. As the minutes went by he became horribly
agitated. At last he got up, and began to pace up and down the room,
looking like a beautiful caged thing. He took long stealthy strides. His
hands were curiously cold.

The suspense became unbearable. Time seemed to him to be crawling with
feet of lead, while he by monstrous winds was being swept towards the
jagged edge of some black cleft of precipice. He knew what was waiting
for him there; saw it indeed, and, shuddering, crushed with dank hands
his burning lids as though he would have robbed the very brain of sight,
and driven the eyeballs back into their cave. It was useless. The brain
had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination, made
grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain,
danced like some foul puppet on a stand, and grinned through moving
masks. Then, suddenly, Time stopped for him. Yes: that blind,
slow-breathing thing crawled no more, and horrible thoughts, Time being
dead, raced nimbly on in front, and dragged a hideous future from its
grave, and showed it to him. He stared at it. Its very horror made him
stone.

At last the door opened, and his servant entered. He turned glazed eyes
upon him.

"Mr. Campbell, sir," said the man.

A sigh of relief broke from his parched lips, and the colour came back
to his cheeks.

"Ask him to come in at once, Francis." He felt that he was himself
again. His mood of cowardice had passed away.

The man bowed, and retired. In a few moments Alan Campbell walked in,
looking very stern and rather pale, his pallor being intensified by his
coal-black hair and dark eyebrows.

"Alan! this is kind of you. I thank you for coming."

"I had intended never to enter your house again, Gray. But you said it
was a matter of life and death." His voice was hard and cold. He spoke
with slow deliberation. There was a look of contempt in the steady
searching gaze that he turne